Wowee Zowee

Certain Songs #1493: Pavement – “Grave Architecture”

March 27, 2019 by Jim Connelly

Album: Wowee Zowee
Year: 1995

“It takes a lot”

Yet another Wowee Zowee song with a weird structure and cryptic lyrics — which start with a disarmingly friendly Stephen Malkmus asking us to “come on in –“Grave Architecture” ended up grabbing me for a pretty weird reason, even for me: the rhythm guitar on the choruses (I guess) reminded me of some the mid-1960s Rolling Stones produced by Andrew Loog Oldham, circa The Rolling Stones Now!, Out of Our Heads or Aftermath

Certain Songs #1492: Pavement – “Grounded”

March 26, 2019 by Jim Connelly

Album: Wowee Zowee
Year: 1995

“Boys are dying on these … streets”

While I was doing research on Wowee Zowee, I saw more than one comparison to The Beatles, that eclectic follow up to Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band that also confused the hell out of people when it came out, and is now held up as a precursor to sprawling experimental indie rock albums like Wowee Zowee.

And that does make some sense. While the other four Pavement albums tapped out between 11-14 songs, Wowee Zowee came in at a massive 18 songs, and was wildly divergent from track to track, even for a band that stuck a 5/4 “jazz” workout in between a pair of folk-rock singles, so it never quite got the momentum the previous two records ended up with.

Certain Songs #1491: Pavement – “We Dance”

March 25, 2019 by Jim Connelly

Album: Wowee Zowee
Year: 1995

Check that expiration date, man

It was March of 1995, and I was living in Oakland and flying down to L.A. to visit Rox, who was living on an apartment on Hollywood Blvd. And, of course, during that spring/summer, there was always loads of CD shopping, as there was still a plethora of what we used to call “record stores” in Hollywood.

It was during one of those trips where I bought the first taste of the follow-up to Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, the Rattled by La Rush EP. And I was puzzled: unlike the three singles from Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain — “Cut Your Hair,” “Gold Soundz” and “Range Life” — for those of you keeping score at home, “Rattled by The Rush” was far less pop and far more difficult, and as such was the perfect lead single for Wowee Zowee, perhaps the most difficult of all of the difficult third albums ever released.